Formal Verification Methods for Quantum Systems

It has been predicted that any large-scale overhaul of
information science in the 21st century will have to include quantum
information. The last decade has witnessed a quantum leap in both
design and implementation of quantum protocols, which rely on various
fundamental properties of quantum mechanics for their performance,
security and correctness. The increasing complexity of these advanced
quantum protocols demands a unified high-level approach to their formal
verification, far beyond the currently available ad-hoc schemes based
on matrix calculus.

The overall goal of the project is to develop temporal logics and
model checking techniques for quantum systems, similarly to the
development in the classical world. However the existing classical
methods have to be properly extended to address fundamentally different
concepts of quantum systems, such as entanglement which will affect the
structure of the agent's local view in a protocol. The first approach
would be based on characterising the class of
quantum properties that can be abstracted into similar classical properties
to be verified using classical model checking. This will pave the road to
develop the required logic which can explicitly express unique aspects of
the dynamics of quantum systems, and to develop model checking
algorithms for it. The general aim is to bring logic-based formal
reasoning techniques into the
domain of quantum computation.